”Dancing With the Stars”: An obvious elimination

Okay, so no more Tucker Carlson. Not even the fervent political endorsement of Al Sharpton (who last week called the political-talk-show host ”a leader who will dance for what we believe in”) could have saved him last night. Tucker himself admitted that having his partner, Elena Grinenko, show him how to dance was ”like Einstein teaching addition to a slow child!” Ooh, someone’s been coming up with his zingers the day of! At least Tucker seemed happy about the verdict — convenient, because no one else seemed to want him there anyway.

But exsqueeze me? What was my favorite new ”star,” Willa Ford, doing in the bottom two? I can understand her not having an established fan base, but wasn’t she, like, in third place last night? The judges and hosts are so shady in ”explaining” the scoring process that I guess I’m not surprised. How much do the judges’ votes count compared with the popular vote? I would appreciate some percentages. Not that I would do any calculations. I’d just like to see some numbers. They make television more exciting.

Anyway, last night’s results show featured a lot of stuff I didn’t really appreciate, like Len Goodman throwing unnecessary verbal smack at Shanna Moakler (you just don’t yell at beauty queens) and a seven-minute-long commercial for Slim-Fast in which a girl with a ”humongous butt” danced around in someone’s rec room and no one even drank a Slim-Fast. I suddenly don’t want to drink a Slim-Fast like I’ve never not wanted to drink a Slim-Fast in my life. And is the Slim-Fast Dance Challenge going to occur every single week? With different people? This will drive me to drink. Milkshakes.

Some smart person decided to unfreeze Tom Jones and have him perform two songs. He looked hilarious bopping around in his shiny burnt-orange candy coating (skin) and that bitchin’ monochromatic suit. Everything was midnight blue! He wasn’t messin’ around. Neither were the 11 pro dancers, who cranked out an impressive group exhibition while their ”star” counterparts sat backstage, gawking and feeling clumsy.

Since I’m really groping in the dark for material here, I might as well mention that one of the audience members interviewed was, eerily, Sarah Eisele from The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency. It was so freaky to have visual proof that our world and Janice Dickinson’s actually do collide. Who knew we’d ever see Sarah again? And where was Janice to get all up in her face and shatter her confidence after she managed to spit out a sentence?

At this point, it looks like non-dancer Emmitt Smith and totally-a-dancer-as-a-teen Mario Lopez are the front-runners for the season. And like it or not (I kind of do), Jerry Springer could end up going pretty far. He’s got the fan base, and as he joked, ”maybe they’re just happy to see me alive?”

Until next time (I’ll be filing a TV Watch every week after the Wednesday-night results shows), what do you think? Is Mario a ringer? Will you miss hearing Tucker mouth off? And who deserves to drift back into semi-obscurity next?